The fronting of the back vowel /u/is an ongoing sound change in many varieties of English. While /u/-fronting is argued to be primarily phonetically constrained, many studies report the significant role of various social factors, including ethnicity. This article investigates the linguistic and social conditioning of /u/-fronting in Toronto English. A sociophonetic analysis of /u/, extracted from spontaneous speech data of second-generation Filipinos and age-matched Anglos, was conducted to determine whether Filipinos exhibit /u/-fronting and to what extent coarticulatory and social factors affect degree of fronting. Results of a multivariate analysis show that male and female Filipinos produce fronted realizations of /u/as often as their Anglo peers. However, Filipinos exhibit greater fronting than Anglos in coronal and palatal contexts, which may be explained by cross-language influence from Tagalog. Taken together, this study suggests that, although Filipinos join other Torontonians in /u/-fronting, they nonetheless exhibit finer-grained differences when phonetic conditioning is taken into account.

中文翻译：

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菲律宾人也在前线！多伦多英语 /u/-Fronting 的社会语音分析

后元音 /u/ 的前移是许多英语变体中持续的声音变化。虽然 /u/-fronting 被认为主要受语音限制，但许多研究报告了包括种族在内的各种社会因素的重要作用。本文研究了多伦多英语中 /u/-fronting 的语言和社会条件。从第二代菲律宾人和年龄匹配的盎格鲁人的自发语音数据中提取的 /u/ 的社会语音分析旨在确定菲律宾人是否表现出 /u/ 正面以及协同和社会因素对正面程度的影响程度。多变量分析的结果表明，男性和女性菲律宾人产生 /u/ 的前沿实现与他们的盎格鲁同龄人一样频繁。然而，菲律宾人在冠状和腭的情况下比盎格鲁人表现出更大的正面，这可以通过他加禄语的跨语言影响来解释。综上所述，这项研究表明，尽管菲律宾人在 /u/-fronting 方面加入了其他多伦多人，但在考虑到语音条件时，他们仍然表现出更细粒度的差异。